

UX Roundup: AI as Interviewer | Design Theater | The Planning Fallacy | Humans as Middleware | Long-Horizon Tasks | Good Videos
AI conducting user interviews mostly failed to probe deeply | AI UI tools break 1/4 of their design promises | The planning fallacy makes us believe more in schedules than they deserve | Cards as a UI element | Humans are middleware for AI | How to make AI support extended tasks that take weeks to complete | Two recommended AI videos in sharply different genres and durations

Jakob Nielsen
13 minutes ago17 min read


Cards: How a 3×5 Rectangle Conquered Screen Design
A card packs everything about one item (image, title, key facts, action) inside a clearly bounded rectangle that the user’s visual system sees as a single object, which is why cards excel at presenting browsable collections of self-contained things. But boxing everything produces flabby layouts with pitiful information density, and now that AI makes cards that no designer ever inspects, the old guidelines need a new enforcement mechanism.

Jakob Nielsen
1 day ago20 min read


The 50 Most Common User Research Methods, Ranked by Value
The 50 most common user research methods scored on breadth of scope, depth of insights, remote suitability, and cost, then ranked by total value.

Jakob Nielsen
2 days ago22 min read


UX Roundup: AI Spending Up | Adversarial AI Helps Designers | Design Hypotheses | Generative Accessibility | Skeleton Screens | Pain of Paying
AI spending growing 75% per year at the median firm | An AI agent that argued back against design ideas helped designers improve | A design is a hypothesis: try to defeat it | AI can generate superior accessibility when it prioritizes communication density over narrative completeness | Skeleton screens buy patience, not speed | Checkout design dials the pain of paying up or down

Jakob Nielsen
4 days ago21 min read


UX Roundup: Hedonic Adaptation | Knowledge Worker AI | AI Sensemaking | Delegating Agent Actions | Branching UI vs. Linear Chat | Base-Rate Neglect | Rating Controls | Animated Prompt Understanding
New music video about hedonic adaptation | AI better at some forms of knowledge work than at others | AI increasingly used for sensemaking among corporate users | Users want to approve certain autonomous actions | For exploratory creation, a branching UI beat the traditional linear chat interface to the AI backend model | Base-rate neglect: one vivid anecdote outweighs a thousand statistics | The ***** UI for user ratings | Experimental system connects specific words in the u

Jakob Nielsen
Aug 1421 min read


Cognitive Load Is a Budget, Not an Enemy: Design for the Brain’s 4 Chunks
Cognitive load is the mental effort users spend to perceive, understand, decide, and act within an interface, drawn from a working memory that holds roughly 4 chunks. The design task is allocation: spend that scarce budget on the user’s goal, cut everything else, and mind the new debts run up by open loops and Slow AI. 26 design guidelines show how.

Jakob Nielsen
Aug 1218 min read


UX Roundup: AI Diffusion Speed | Synthetic Personas | AI Learning | Brad Myers | Agatha Christie | Mental Accounting | Grok Imagine 2
AI technical capabilities are exploding, but sophisticated use crawls | Synthetic personas exaggerate demographics | AI hurts education when used wrong | Professor Brad Myers is a UX hero | In the future, we’ll all be Agatha Christie | Mental accounting gives users separate budgets for separate expenses | Grok releases upgraded image model

Jakob Nielsen
Aug 1018 min read


Progress Indicators Ease the Wait
Show a progress indicator when response time exceeds 10 seconds, preferably as a percent-done bar. It tells users two things: the system heard you, and here’s how long the ordeal will last. But never let the bar stall, lie, or reset. AI agents that work for hours have raised the stakes: progress indicators must now serve users who walked away. Follow the 12 design guidelines in this article.

Jakob Nielsen
Aug 813 min read


UX Roundup: Simplicity | Fact Flooding | AI Integration | AI Adoption Personas | Tone of Voice | Timelines | Cybersecurity | Agentic E-commerce
Keep It Simple | AI uses fact flooding to overwhelm users and persuade them | Deep AI integration in business processes | 5 personas for adopting AI | Using AI to change the tone of voice of your writing | Timelines: a chrono-based UI | AI improves cybersecurity | Increasing use of AI agents for online shopping

Jakob Nielsen
Aug 723 min read


The Framing Effect in UX: Identical Facts, Opposite Decisions
Describe an option as a gain, and people play it safe; describe the same option as a loss, and they gamble. No presentation is frame-free, so pick the frame that maximizes comprehension, and audit your funnels for frames that merely maximize clicks. Every screen is a framing device. Yours included.

Jakob Nielsen
Aug 616 min read


76 Open Research Questions in AI Usability
AI is the biggest change to UX design in 60 years, yet we know embarrassingly little about how people actually use it. Here are 76 open research questions, organized into 7 lists sized for everyone from high school students to the big AI labs. Students who complete a research challenge gain the two qualities employers now screen for: agency and demonstrated AI experience.

Jakob Nielsen
Aug 526 min read


Satisficing: Users Pick the First Good-Enough Option, Not the Best One
Users don’t choose the best option; they choose the first satisfactory one, and then they stop looking. This behavior, called satisficing, decides which link gets clicked, which default survives, and which of your features nobody ever sees. Design so that the first plausible option is also the correct option, and the lazy click becomes the right click.

Jakob Nielsen
Aug 413 min read


UX Roundup: Design Guidelines Changing for AI | AI Anxiety | Toggle Switches | Erdős Problems | Glanceable Monitoring
Design guidelines held steady for 30 years but are shifting with AI | Users who are anxious about AI use it more, not less | A toggle is a light switch, not a form field | What are the Erdős problems and why are they relevant for AI? | An ambient monitoring interface with glanceable feedback on agent progress cut errors in hal

Jakob Nielsen
Aug 319 min read


Hedonic Adaptation: The Same Design Scores Lower Every Year
Users adapt to good design the way lottery winners adapt to wealth: the thrill fades and the baseline resets. Hold a design constant, and its satisfaction ratings will sag year after year as expectations rise; my rule of thumb is a drift of 2–5% annually. Budget continuous improvement just to stay level, and spend it on killing recurring irritations before adding sparkle.

Jakob Nielsen
Aug 25 min read


UX Roundup: Web Design for AI Agents | AI Assistants Beat Brand Websites | Ship, Learn, Iterate | AI as Business Strategist | AI-Assisted Creativity for Children | Infinite Canvas | Scott McCloud
Agent-ready web design lifts AI task success | Shoppers now pick AI assistants over brand websites, 41% to 38% | Learn from reality: build and iterate | AI getting better at business strategy, but still not good enough to run your company | AI raised the floor but lowered the ceiling in children’s storytelling | Infinite canvas as a UI space for organizing and collaborating on unstructured information | My Hero: Scott McCloud, comic book artist and theorist | AI animates clas

Jakob Nielsen
Jul 3125 min read
